Asquith (16 page)

The edge of criticism here, of course lay more in the suggestion of
Asquith’s pre-occupation with society than of his immersion in the law. Insofar as there was a basis for the suggestion it arose partly, but by no means entirely, out of his second marriage. Several years before this took place he was living a life (while a minister) in which it was possible, as he recorded perhaps more with surprise than pleasure, to lunch three times in one week in the company of Balfour’s friend, Lady Elcho, and also to sit next to her twice at dinner. But a week of such concentrated social activity was more unusual for him in the early ’nineties than at the end of the decade. Until 1894 Asquith gave very few luncheon or dinner parties of his own and went to no balls. After his marriage he was no less active as a host (or perhaps as a hostess’s husband) than as a guest, and, in addition, his summer nights were often rounded-off by brief, non-dancing visits to the balls of the season. His wife has testified that this worldy activity was only of superficial interest to him, and there is certainly force in her parallel view that Iris outlook and actions were never influenced by any desire to stand well in the drawing-rooms of London. Why then, did he choose to spend so much time in them? The answer is partly that this was the sort of life he thought he had settled for when he married Margot, and partly that, when not engaged in the actual business of law or politics, he increasingly enjoyed feminine rather than masculine company, and frivolous rather than serious conversation; and this was the easiest way to find it.

Margot Asquith herself was a specialist in conversation which was both feminine and frivolous, and it might have been expected that her husband’s desires in this direction would be satisfied at home. But she was perhaps a better performer in public than in private. And although their marriage forged a strong and lasting bond of intellectual and political loyalty between them, and was also a considerable success from the point of view of Margot’s relations with the Asquith children, its early years were overshadowed by her persistent ill-health. In May, 1895, her first confinement resulted in a few days of great fear for her life, the loss of the child, and her condemnation, as a result of phlebitis, to three months of prostration.

She was by no means entirely solitary or consistently cast down during these months,
¹
but it was obviously a dismal and trying period,

particularly when the general election took away from London not only her husband but most of her other friends as well. And at the end of it she was far from recovering her full health.

¹
_{In her
Autobiography
(I, p. 289) she describes a visit from Harcourt on June 21 st: “I had seen most of my political and other friends—Mr. Gladstone, Lord Haldane, Mr. Birrell, Lord Spencer, Lord Rosebery, the Arch
bishop of Canterbury, John Morley, Arthur Balfour, Sir Alfred Lyall and Admiral Maxse—and was delighted to see Sir William Harcourt.” This visit took place on the evening of the Government’s defeat on the cordite vote, and Harcourt only just got back into the House in time. But John Morley, who had unexpectedly joined Harcourt at her bedside, was still with her—and unpaired—when the division took place.}

“For many years after my first confinement,” she wrote, “I was a delicate woman.” Her disease was regarded as neurasthenia, and its worst manifestation was a persistent and almost complete sleeplessness. “Not the least sorrowful part of having neurasthenia ” she continued, “ is that your will-power, your character and your body are almost equally affected by it.” And again: “ No one who has not experienced over any length of time real sleeplessness can imagine what this means.. . insomnia is akin to insanity.”
^c

There were occasional periods of relief. She enjoyed “ bouts of health golfing in Scotland and hunting in Leicestershire,” and at the beginning of 1897 she managed a successful confinement and her daughter Elizabeth was born.
¹

¹
_{1897-1945
In 1919 she married the Roumanian diplomat Prince Antoine Bibesco.}

In addition she always had great buoyancy of spirit, at least in public. But her troubles continued for a long time. All her pregnancies were difficult ones. Her son Anthony— Asquith’s last child—was born in 1902, but, in addition to the misfortune of 1895, she lost two other children at birth—in 1899 and 1907. Her ill-health, according to her own testimony, continued for so long that “ in the year 1908, when my husband became Prime Minister, I went to St. Paul’s Cathedral and prayed that I might die rather than hamper his life as an invalid.”
^d

The effect of all this was private rather than public. Margot did not become a recluse. Nor was there any question of a foundering of the marriage or a rupture of relations between herself and Asquith. But it did mean that the fulfilment he found was not as complete as he had perhaps hoped for before the marriage took place. It was not only that her illness made her difficult to live with. He probably expected that she would in any event be that. Rather was it that it made her less exhilarating and satisfying—which he had certainly not expected.

During these years towards and around the turn of the century Asquith’s appearance underwent a great change. When the Liberal Government left office he was 42. He still looked a young man. Although he was always of rather stocky build he was not particularly heavy and his features were clear cut. His hair was fair and rather neat. He retained something of his Oxford and Hampstead air of ingenuous earnestness.

At first the main change in his appearance which resulted from his marriage was a considerable smartening-up of his dress. Left to himself he was always indifferent to clothes, but Margot thought them mere important. Her account of their first meeting stressed his virtues despite the fact that he was “ unfashionably dressed.” And in their early letters there were occasional mocking remarks—from both sides— about the inelegance of his suits and hats. For a short time this was corrected. Their marriage photographs show that on this day at least he was fully presentable; and in the picture facing p. 64 which was taken in the summer of 1898 and shows Asquith walking with his daughter Elizabeth, he had even achieved a certain glossiness.

It was a short-lived quality. This photograph was a transitional one. His features were still young but they had become plump. A few years later the youth had gone. He put on much more weight, his face became not merely full-cheeked but heavy-jowled, and his hair became quite grey and, apparently, much looser in texture. By 1902 or ’03 Ills appearance was that of a man well-advanced in middle-age. And with this advance there went the final abandonment of any attempt at elegance. Either Margot had ceased to care or, in this respect, he had revolted against her influence. His clothes were mostly the conventional ones for the occasion—although both on the golf course and in Scotland he preferred blue serge to tweed—but were baggy and carelessly worn. His hair was allowed to grow much longer, and he visited the barber with reluctance. In general his appearance became rather shaggy and he assumed that look of dignified, benevolent slovenliness, which was how he was to be best remembered. It is well expressed by the photograph opposite p. 320, which shows him in Whitehall in the early years of the Liberal Government of 1905. Thereafter he did not change much until well after the end of his premiership.

The troubles which had beset the Liberal Party in government and during the general election showed no sign of diminishing in the new Parliament. Before it had even met Rosebery communicated to Lord Spencer his “ irrevocable decision not to meet Harcourt in council any more.” Harcourt received the news from Spencer. Asquith received it direct from Rosebery in a letter dated August 12th. This referred to “ the contingency which we foresaw ” having arrived, and made it clear that the proscription meant there could be no full meetings of former Liberal ministers, and that Rosebery wished all his colleagues to know what he had written in his letter to Spencer: “ Had we boxes I would circulate it in a box! ”

“Let me say one word quite frankly to you,” he concluded.

“I am more than willing to stand aside, if that should be judged best for the party. Nor does it seem easy to see how in our shattered condition the party can be led by a peer. But what would be worse, and indeed worst, would be that the party should be led by a Commons Castor and a peer Pollux who disagree on every subject and communicate on none.”

For a man of such notoriously bad temper Harcourt took the proscription with remarkable equanimity. He referred to it as “a damned piece of impertinence ” but, according to Lord Spencer, these were “ the only bitter words used by him.” Perhaps he was as reluctant as Rosebery to make any further attempts at co-operation, but was delighted that the responsibility for the break should rest so obviously on the other side. For a brief moment, at this stage, the possibility of an Asquith leadership was discussed, but as Harcourt showed no disposition to retire—why should he have played Rosebery’s game for him?—the proposal lapsed.

It was accepted that for the time being the 1894 arrangement should
persist. Harcourt would lead in the Commons and Kimberley in the Lords, while Rosebery would retain the titular leadership of the whole party, although his lack of any contact with Harcourt obviously made this role almost meaningless. Demoralisation followed rapidly and inevitably from this situation. Harcourt himself, with his old trouper’s persistence, plodded on from the front bench, but there was hardly any one to support him. “ Asquith went off to Scotland for good yesterday,” he wrote to his wife on August 15th. “ Campbell-Bannerman will not return from Marienbad. Bryce only is left, and he is off this week to the Cape. Acland is ill and Fowler shows up rarely”
^a

At the end of the month Parliament adjourned until February, and the Liberal Party was given an interval for re-grouping. It made little use of the opportunity. In January Asquith spent twenty-four hours with Rosebery at Mentmore and made a determined effort to move him into a more co-operative position. He did not succeed. “ You did not convince me the other evening, nor I you,” Rosebery wrote on January 29th. “ I act as an obstacle, real or apparent, to the unity of the Liberal Party,” he continued. “ I am therefore bound in the interests of the party and its unity to offer some remedy or alternative, and thus I offer to take a back seat, nay, if necessary, to retire from politics, at any rate for a time. What more can I do? ” But this was not what Asquith wanted, and he kept the knowledge of Rosebery’s nearness to resignation to as narrow a circle as possible.

In the following August Rosebery drew up and circulated to his colleagues a memorandum which gave political and not merely personal shape to his discontents.

“ There will be I suppose this autumn calls for a definite Liberal policy,” he began. “ Any such calls will be in my opinion premature, and, as far as I am concerned, futile.... It is impossible for the Liberal Party to remain nailed to the innumerable political propositions lightly accepted by Mr. Gladstone for the promotion of his Irish policy. The party needs to make a new start and to shed much of this—which may be desirable in the abstract or may not—but which by its bulk and multifarious aggressiveness constitutes an encumbrance—not an inspiration or assistance.. . .

I believe that the best chance for the Liberal party lies much more in reaction from the present government than in any gospel of its own. The present government is the first Tory government since 1867: weakly and distractedly Tory no doubt, but comelled to be Tory by the brute force of its majority.... This is an immense advantage to the Liberal party, because it forces real Liberals back to that party, and helps on the process which all true Liberals must have at heart—the restoration of the Liberal party to what it was in richness, variety and strength before 1886.”
^b

This was the clearest outline of his political attitude given by Rosebery during these years, and it contained one strand of thought—that of hope for the restoration of the pre - 1886 balance—which was later to separate him sharply from Asquith. The memorandum was also a prelude to his resignation, although it did not state this, and his mind, at least as to timing, may easily not have been made up when he wrote it. But at the end of September Gladstone suddenly emerged from retirement. In the last public speech of his life, at Liverpool, he delivered a great denunciation of the Armenian massacres, accompanied by a demand for British intervention against the Turks. This Rosebery chose to treat not only as a last speech but as “ the last straw on his back.” His personal relations with Gladstone had remained perfectly friendly —and continued so—but he regarded the G.O.M.’s final policy demand as totally unacceptable, and its promulgation as further undermining his own position. In fact Harcourt was just as opposed to Gladstone’s demands as was Rosebery
¹
but, unlike Rosebery, he was not worried that they would enable “ discontented Liberals to pelt him with (Gladstone’s) authority.” Nor was he looking for an excuse to resign. But Rosebery was, and on October 6th he wrote to Ellis, the Chief Whip, announcing laconically that “ the leadership of the party, so far as I am concerned, is vacant.”